Author's Biography

Steven Michael Thomas grew up in a working class suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, where he was not an Eagle Scout or member of the boys choir. He left home the first time at 15, spending the summer hitchhiking across the country, working at odd jobs and writing a journal. He has lived in Ohio, Florida, the Bahamas, and London as well as St. Louis and Southern California.

Thomas was educated — eventually — at Antioch University, the University of Missouri, St. Louis (B.A. English, summa cum laude, 1997) and the University of California, Irvine (Regent’s Fellowship, MFA, 1999). Since the mid-1990s, his poetry and short stories have been published in more than 50 literary and small press magazines in the U.S. and England, including The Minnesota Review, Tampa Review, The Tennessee Review, Phoebe, Poem, The Chattahoochee Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and California Quarterly. His journalism has appeared in a number of national publications, and he has won dozens of awards and prizes as a poet, essayist, fiction writer and journalist.

Before jumping at the chance to become a fulltime novelist when his agent Loretta Fidel got him a multi-book contract with Random House in 2006, Thomas worked at different times as a magazine editor, journalist and college lecturer, teaching rhetoric, poetry and composition at the University of California, Irvine. He has also been a short order cook and an aluminum siding salesman.

He is now at work on the third novel in his literary crime fiction series featuring burglar and stickup man Robert Rivers. Set in Prescott, Arizona, the book is an attempt to graft some of the entertaining features of the classic western onto a contemporary crime fiction framework. The second book in the series, Criminal Karma, will be published by Ballantine Books in 2009.

Thomas lives with his wife and daughter in the city of Orange in Orange County, California. Below is an interview in which he talks about the content of and inspiration for Criminal Paradise.

An Interview With Steven M. Thomas

Describe “Criminal Paradise” in a nutshell.

It is Ross MacDonald meets John MacDonald with some Elmore Leonard thrown in.

That sounds like quite a combination. Can you elaborate?

The writing aims for the kind of literary quality you find in Ross MacDonald’s classic series of Lew Archer detective novels, but the plot revolves around hardcore characters and action more like those in John MacDonald’s Travis McGee adventures. Robert Rivers, the protagonist of “Criminal Paradise,” operates outside the law, same as Travis McGee does much of the time, but the book is set in Southern California, the home turf of straight arrow Lew Archer. Both Archer and McGee are men who pack a conscience as well as a pistol, modulating the inevitable violence of their professions with a strong moral compass. Robert Rivers fits the same mold.

What is the Elmore Leonard connection?

The book’s Elmore Leonard quality comes from its humor and the fact that it is told from the point of view of a robber instead of a cop or P.I. Like Leonard’s wonderfully entertaining novels it takes readers behind the curtain to see the planning and execution of crimes and the intricacies of criminal relationships.

What is the story about?

Robert Rivers is a professional criminal living the good life along Southern California’s idyllic coast. He specializes in high-end burglaries and armed robberies that are carefully planned not just for success but to minimize the chances of anyone getting hurt. During a restaurant robbery, he and his partner Switch find a picture of a naked Vietnamese girl along with a big chunk of unexplained cash. Investigating, they uncover a sex slave smuggling operation run by a Newport Beach businessman. When Rivers and his associates take on the smugglers and rescue the girl, it sparks several days of mayhem. A series of increasingly violent raids and counter-raids between the “good” and “bad” criminals result in multiple killings and the transformation of Rivers’ carefully constructed lifestyle.

How important is the California location?

The book is built around it. Southern California is crime fiction central. There are good books and crime series set in New York, Florida, New Orleans and plenty of other places, but no locale compares with Los Angeles and its environs as a setting for mystery, murder and criminal escapades. All of Raymond Chandler’s books unfold in Southern California, along with those of Ross MacDonald, James Ellroy, Robert Crais, T. Jefferson Parker and Sue Grafton, among many others. Moving to Southern California ten years ago is what inspired me to write crime fiction. Setting the book here was empowering, and gave me a sense of operating within a wonderful literary tradition.

Where did the sex smuggling theme come from?

From real life. When I first moved to California, I lived in Long Beach where much of “Criminal Paradise” takes place. I had only been on the coast a few weeks when I saw an article in the paper about a cargo container full of people from Southeast Asia that was discovered at the Port of Long Beach. Long Beach’s port is the second busiest in the United States and it is adjacent to Port of Los Angeles, which is the busiest, and human trafficking is a tragic part of the commerce that flows through the two ports.

How big of a problem is human smuggling?

Huge. According to the U.S. State Department’s most recent report on the subject, an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, with the U.S. as a primary destination. Approximately 80 percent are women and girls, and up to 50 percent are minors. Like the character Song in “Criminal Paradise,” a majority of the smuggled women and girls are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. Vietnam, where Song comes from, continues to be a source of smuggled women. Between 2005-2007, Vietnamese authorities arrested more than 1,600 people involved in human trafficking.

You started out as a poet. What made you switch to crime fiction?

The impact of California was really the main reason. I started reading crime fiction when I moved here and between the books and the environment, fiction just had a stronger pull. Southern California is one of the most exciting and colorful places in the world. There is no end to the criminal adventures that can be set here or the atmospheric locales that can be used for backdrops. The Pacific Ocean with its delicate fringe of palms, the blue mountains and golden deserts, and the lingering presence of writers like Chandler and MacDonald sparked a new ambition and made me want to write crime fiction more than I ever wanted to do anything else.

Do you still write poetry?

My most recent bout with poetry was four or five years ago when I wrote and published a series of poems about a school shooting in San Diego County.

So even your poetry deals with crime.

Those poems did. And, actually, a surprising proportion of literature does. From Chaucer and Shakespeare to Dickens and Dostoyevsky to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, many of the best and most famous American and European poems and stories are built around theft, assault, and murder. “The Pardoner’s Tale,” “Macbeth” and “Hamlet,” “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations,” “To Have and Have Not” and “The Great Gatsby” all could be classified as crime fiction.

Do you think of your books as literature?

That would be presumptuous. Other people have to decide that. I don’t sit down to write with the idea that I am writing literature. I am just trying to tell entertaining stories that have some memorable characters and some heart. If that turns out to be literature, I will be very happy, but I am not counting on it. If I can halfway live up to the high standards of a genre that has been served by as many great writers as crime fiction has, that will be good enough for me.